Reborn as the Empire's Blind Prince

5. The History of Ur

[Dear readers, the world lore is a bit immersive and however you think of it in the end, it's intentional. Love, Author]

Lucian scanned the towering shelves, the unrestricted clarity of his False Sight piercing through thick leather bindings and dusty parchment.

He needed a foundation. The old Lucian had been kept in absolute ignorance of the world he lived in. If Ming Ho was going to survive, he had to fill that void.

He bypassed the complex magical theory texts for now and pulled a heavy decaying book from the bottom shelf, 'The Genesis of Ur: A World's History.'

He rested the book on a reading stand and flipped it open. The pages were brittle, the text cryptic and archaic.

Worse, the margins were filled with crude, disturbing charcoal sketches of warped beasts and bleeding skies.

'The art is so bad for a book of this prestige. Even I could've done better,' he mused.

Despite being a pragmatic science student, Ming Ho had always appreciated art. To him, art was just another form of logic, like a way to express things when words failed.

It was the difference between reading a dense novel and seeing the visceral image of the novel in manga panels. Good art made the impossible feel real. This art, however, was just a mess.

But as he stared at the poorly drawn pages, he realized something incredible.

He wasn't reading word by word. He didn't have to. With his False Sight operating at full potential in the dark, he simply looked at the page, and the entire contents, every cryptic paragraph, every sketchy line of ink was instantly digested by his brain.

It was like a high-speed camera snapping a photograph. He could grab the entirety of a page in a single glance.

'This would have been really incredible and helpful in my old world,' he thought, a pang of bitter nostalgia hitting him.

'I wouldn't have had to stay up all night cramming for all those exams. I might have actually had time to live a little.'

He let out a quiet sigh. 'One can only dream. But this is my reality now.'

Pushing the memories away, he began flipping the pages rapidly. The heavy parchment turned like a blur.

In a matter of minutes, he had downloaded thousands of years of the world's history directly into his mind.

The world he had reincarnated into was called Ur.

At its dawn, Ur was profoundly ordinary. Its inhabitants lived simple, mundane lives with no essence, no magic, and no grand technological advancements.

It was a world of absolute, unbroken harmony. There were no dividing empires or warring kingdoms. Humanity lived in relative peace, unbound by the greed of supernatural powers.

It had one universal law, Perfect Harmony.

Then, everything ended. The First Shift, known in modern times as The Big Awakening was recorded roughly forty thousand years ago.

Because the world fell into instant, apocalyptic chaos, no concrete records survived the immediate aftermath.

A millennium later, an organization known as the School of Thoughts attempted to piece together what had happened, resulting in two conflicting ideologies that split the intellectual world in half.

The first school of thought, which was widely considered the most logical and scientifically reasonable, claimed the shift occurred due to the violent explosion of a celestial star.

This cosmic event did not merely scorch the sky; it fundamentally mutated the biology of everything it touched.

Human souls were suddenly forced to host an entirely new metaphysical organ, an internal core that generated a foreign energy known as Essence.

The human body underwent a brutal, forced evolution.

Muscular density mutated, neurological pathways expanded, and the human spirit was violently divided into specialized archetypes: those who could physically shape their energy, those whose senses expanded past mortal limits, those who could dominate space, and those who could fortify their flesh into living armor.

Plants were radically warped by the residual starlight. Simple foliage developed predatory instincts or absorbed toxic essence from the soil.

New, hyper-potent fruits began to grow, some offering immense structural power and intoxicating sweetness, while others bore lethal, flesh-melting poisons that could wipe out an entire settlement.

The animal kingdom suffered the worst. Docile creatures mutated into ravenous, bloodthirsty monsters.

Wolves grew to the size of carriages, their fangs dripping with acidic essence; avians developed wings of razor-sharp iron.

A forced, hyper-accelerated survival of the fittest pushed these apex beasts to actively hunt humanity to the absolute brink of extinction.

The second school of thought offered a far more submissive, religious narrative. It claimed that ancient, invisible gods had been watching over Ur since its inception.

The shift was not a disaster, but a divine blessing, a forced pruning of the world to pave the way for a holy utopia where mortals would be granted power in exchange for eternal servitude to their celestial masters.

Regardless of which theory the common folk believed, the lived reality for humanity was an agonizing era of peril, hunger, and utter destruction.

With the old harmonious lifestyle completely obliterated, survival became the only thing that mattered.

Little groups of survivors began to band together, clustering tightly around the few Awakened who possessed the raw power to fight back the mutated beasts.

Over centuries, these small tribal groups naturally expanded. From defensive outposts, they grew into states.

From states, they conquered neighboring territories to form countries.

Eventually, after thousands of years of systemic slaughter and political maneuvering, the geopolitical landscape of Ur settled into the Four Great Empires , each ruled by a distinct, terrifyingly powerful bloodline:

The Valerian Empire, Governed with an iron fist by the Everstar family.

The Randolph Empire, Masters of fortification and grand, immovable architecture.

The Griess Empire, A territory defined by its ruthless military advancement and tactical dominance.

The Madolkan Empire, A mysterious, isolationist faction deeply attuned to ancient, primal applications of essence.

But then, after another ten thousand years of relative stability among the empires, history took an even darker turn.

While the second school of thought's claims about benevolent divine blessings and gods had long been dismissed as religious fairytale nonsense, the terrifying reality of their words finally manifested.

Actual, living gods began to physically manifest across Ur.

They did not descend to bring peace or save humanity from the mutated beasts. Instead, these cosmic entities came as conquerors.

They carved out massive, sovereign territories within the mortal world, built terrifying armies of zealots, and actively challenged the strongest mortal warriors, including the ancient patriarchs of the four royal families, for total dominance over the land.

This celestial invasion forced the School of Thoughts to completely revise their historical models, bringing forth a final, unifying theory that made a sickening amount of sense to Ming Ho's analytical mind.

The Dumb and Costly Theory.

The world had started in absolute perfect harmony. The original Awakening was not a cosmic accident, nor was it a divine gift. It was a localized disaster.

A forgotten faction of ancient humans, growing greedy and unsatisfied with a mundane, equal existence and forced harmony, had attempted to alter the fundamental laws of reality to claim personal dominance over their peers.

They enacted a catastrophic ritual that shattered the cosmic boundaries protecting Ur.

The resulting backdraft, the explosion of reality itself breaking was what forced magic, essence, and mutation into the world.

But breaking a universal law of that magnitude carried a heavy price.

The First Shift didn't just give humans superpower classes; it ripped a permanent, bleeding crack in the fabric of space.

The world of Ur had spent forty thousand years acting as a beacon in a dark universe, and the foreign gods invading the planet were simply predators crawling through the crack that humanity had stupidly carved open themselves.

Lucian slammed the heavy history book together, the loud thud echoing sharply through the quiet, dark library like a gunshot.

'How catastrophic,' he thought, running a hand through his hair and rubbing his throbbing temples.

It was easily the most idiotic and terrifying sequence of historical events he had ever processed.

Humans had literally broken their own perfect paradise just to feel powerful, and in doing so, they had accidentally invited cosmic horrors to come and enslave them.

'Why do I even care?' he muttered, shaking his head and exhaling a slow, steady breath.

He didn't need to fight ancient, encroaching gods. He didn't need to solve a forty-thousand-year-old metaphysical mistake made by greedy ancestors.

He just needed to know exactly where he stood on this broken chessboard, survive his upcoming Ordeal in fourteen days, and figure out exactly who had murdered the original owner of this body.

He walked away from the reading stand, his False Sight already scanning the adjacent shelves for books on the mechanics of the Awakening itself. That was what he needed to know, if he was going to survive.